swathed. That was the pervading beauty of the impersonation. The frolic scenes in which Viola participates elicited Ada Rehan's natural propensity for mirth, as also her faculty for comic action. She rejoiced in them, and she made her auditors rejoice in them. But the underlying cause of her success in them was the profound sincerity of her feeling,-over which her joy was seen to play as moonlight plays on the rippling surface of the ocean. In that embodiment she relied on a soft and gentle poetry of condition, avoiding the expedient of strong emphasis, whether of color, demeanor, or speech. Her action was exceedingly delicate, and if at any moment she became conspicuous in a scene it was as the consequence of dramatic necessity, not of self-assertion. Reserve and aristocratic distinction blended in the performance, and dignified and endeared it. The melody of Shakespeare's verse,especially in the passage of Viola's renunciation, fell from her lips in a strain of fluent sweetness that enhanced its beauty and deepened the pathos of its tender significance. In such tones the heart speaks, and not simply the fervor of an excited mind, and so the incommunicable something that the soul knows of love and sorrow finds expression. Ada Rehan was admirably true to the Shakespearean ideal in that particular, as also she was in expressing the large generosity of Viola toward Olivia's beauty. It is only a woman intrinsically noble who can be just toward her prosperous rival in

love. Ada Rehan, in her embodiment of Viola, obeyed the fine artistic impulse to make no effort. Her performance was as natural and as lovely as the opening of the rose. She permitted the pensive tenderness and the sweet gravity which are in her nature to permeate her portraiture of the character, and to express themselves honestly and simply. Her elocution was perfect, -concealing premeditation, and flowing, as a brook flows, with continuous music and spontaneous, accidental variety. She wore the boy-dress with grace. No woman can have played the boy better. Her by-play, in the scene in which Viola attends Orsino while he is listening to Feste's song, was a striking evidence of the inspiration of genius. Her stage business was mostly new. Her appearance was beautiful. Her witchery in Viola did not reside in her action,-although that was appropriate, dignified, symmetrical, expressive, and winning, -but in her assumption and preservation of a sweet, resigned patience; not despairing, not lachrymose,—a gentle, wistful aspect and state of romantic melancholy, veiled, but not concealed, beneath a guise of buoyant, careless joy. The fine instinct with which she thus comprehended and revealed the soul of Viola, together with the wildwood freedom and limpid fluency of her action and the air at once of sensuous allurement and spiritual loveliness with which she invested her ideal, manifested a poetic actress of the first order.

There are many actors of whom the playgoer thinks

with interest and mild approbation, but it is only of the few that he thinks with enthusiasm. Ada Rehan is one of the few, and always the mention of her name awakened and still awakens a thrill of sympathy. Beauty, genius, a kind heart, and rare technical skill,attributes seldom united in one person,-were united in her, and those attributes, in their union, constitute a power such as must always play a serious part in human affairs. Practical minds may despise and contemn the idea of sentiment as to an actress; but each succeeding generation of youth has its heroines of the Stage, who exert upon it, at the most sensitive and susceptible period of life, coloring its ideals, affecting its ambitions, and aiding to form its character, an influence both profound and permanent. Anne Bracegirdle is said to have possessed a prodigious power of that kind, in her day, and so doubtless, at a later time, did Peg Woffington, and Sarah Siddons, and Dora Jordan, and so certainly did Ellen Tree and Adelaide Neilson. There is scarcely a memoir of a distinguished man within the last hundred years that does not show him, at an early, and sometimes at a late, period of his career, in subservience to the spell of genius and art diffused from the Stage by a beautiful woman. Even as great, reserved, and serious a scholar as Matthew Arnold has recorded that he followed from city to city in order to see the French actress Rachel. How essential it is that this artistic influence should be noble

every thinker will at once feel and concede, for its consequences are momentous and endless. The time was blessed beyond its knowledge of its own welfare that was favored with the presence and influence of Ada Rehan. If fifty years had passed away and she had become a memory, there would be no reluctance in the general admission of the truth. The word that then would be said with pensive regret can now, accordingly, be said with grateful admiration. For the audience of her generation this actress was a representative image and an authentic voice. Her experience has become to some extent their experience, and her testimony as to each elemental impulse and feeling of human nature, transmitted through the potencies of dramatic art, has largely contributed to shape their views and establish their convictions. For many a day the standard of dramatic art that she erected in Shakespeare's Rosalind and in Farquhar's Oriana, in Lady Teazle, Peggy Thrift, and Letitia Hardy will maintain itself with inexorable authority upon the Stage, while the ideals of passionate and tender womanhood that she embodied in Katharine, Helena, Viola, Sister Rose, Kate Verity, and Knowles's Julia will crystallize in the popular imagination and enkindle and charm the popular heart.

Another Shakespearean character in which Ada Rehan proved proficient and charming is Mrs. Ford, in "The Merry Wives of Windsor." That play shows